Spiking the Girl

by Lord, Gabrielle

  Gemma rang Beatrice de Berigny and drove to Netherleigh Park.

  Beatrice de Berigny let her into the small sandstone residence, once the gatekeeper’s house, now an elegant home to the presiding school principal of the college. Inside, the stone walls were hung with tasteful art and distant glimpses of the harbour to the north-west and the bays and marinas of the harbourside beaches to the east could be seen through the gauzy curtains. A framed photograph of Miss de Berigny’s merchant banker husband stood on a table. Somewhere, Gemma had read that he preferred living in the marital home in Woollahra.

  The principal of Netherleigh Park had been crying, Gemma was sure. She looked older, plainer, without her usual make-up. ‘It’s all been a most dreadful shock,’ she said as Gemma followed her in. ‘I just don’t know what I’m going to do. The phone hasn’t stopped ringing in the office. I’ve even had some calls on my private line although it’s supposed to be a silent number.’

  She wiped her eyes with a tiny handkerchief and seemed to recover. ‘You must excuse me, Miss Lincoln.’ Her voice was icy now. ‘We’ve never had a staff member arrested before. I’ve just come back from taking him some personal items.’

  ‘What’s Mr Romero saying?’ Gemma asked.

  ‘That he’s completely innocent. That all he did was use that telescope as an aid to anatomical accuracy in his paintings.’

  ‘I’ve heard about the images he had on his laptop,’ Gemma said. ‘They might have been anatomically accurate, but that’s not all they are.’

  The principal averted her face. ‘I am so absolutely shocked and stunned by all this.’

  Gemma wished she could see Beatrice de Berigny’s face as she spoke. There was some other quality underlying her words. Was it rage? Humiliation?

  ‘But,’ the principal continued, ‘he’s an adult and there’s no law against downloading the sorts of things he did. It’s all a matter of personal taste.’ The bitterness in her voice as she uttered these words could have corroded steel, Gemma thought. ‘He’s screaming that he’s completely innocent,’ Miss de Berigny continued.

  ‘I need Mr Romero’s employment details,’ said Gemma.

  ‘What relevance would they have?’

  Is the woman stupid, Gemma thought. Or is this just stalling?

  ‘I need to have a look at where else he’s worked,’ she said patiently. ‘I’m surprised the police haven’t yet contacted you about that.’

  ‘He’ll never work in teaching again,’ said Miss de Berigny after a pause. ‘Besides, that sort of thing is confidential.’

  ‘Miss de Berigny,’ Gemma was getting irritated, ‘I’m investigating a murder case. “Confidential” doesn’t really apply when two of your students were displaying themselves and their bedrooms to the world and the dead body of one of them is found dumped on a vacant lot. Especially when images of both girls have shown up on Mr Romero’s laptop.’

  Those words had a sobering effect. Beatrice de Berigny sank onto a pink linen lounge and blew her nose on the tiny hankie.

  ‘Just let me do my job, please.’ Gemma’s voice was hard. ‘Both the girls had an early appointment with Mr Romero the day of their disappearances. According to him,’ Gemma continued, ‘neither girl showed up for those meetings. And he was late arriving at school on the day of Amy’s disappearance and also Tasmin’s disappearance.’

  Gemma let that sink in.

  ‘I don’t understand what’s been going on.’ Then Beatrice de Berigny straightened herself up and, right in front of Gemma’s eyes, transformed into her professional self. She picked up a set of keys from the table. ‘Follow me, please,’ she said. ‘We need to go over to the office.’

  Twenty minutes later, Gemma was driving home, copies of Mr Romero’s CV safe in her briefcase, thinking over the way Beatrice de Berigny had transformed from genteel obstruction to cooperation. What had happened to make her change that way? Had the awful possibility of one of her employees being a murderer finally penetrated her consciousness?

  She drove back to Lauren Bernhard’s and parked her car opposite. The house summered in the deep shade of the trees around it and the leafy hedges that separated it from its neighbours. On the left stood the two-storey house in which Mr Alistair Forde lived. Gemma got out and crossed the road, enjoying the slight breeze that moved the trees. Languid roses dropped petals as she stepped up to his front door. How many doors have I knocked on, she suddenly wondered, with my questions? And who have I offended to the point of wanting me killed?

  She turned her attention back to the man Lauren Bernhard had called a harmless old bachelor.

  When Alistair Forde answered the door, Gemma noticed how he shrank back. ‘Yes?’ he asked, the lines in his face deepening. Was it suspicion or just puzzlement? In his hand, he gripped a model battleship. ‘I’m gluing this,’ he said. ‘Have to keep it firmly pressed for a minute or two.’

  Gemma flashed a smile and her ID and briefly explained the reason for her visit.

  ‘You’d better come in then,’ he said, stepping back as she did.

  The house seemed very dark after the brilliant afternoon and she was happy to follow him out to a less dim place, a large room with windows onto the back garden, but partly covered with dusty venetian blinds that looked permanently fixed at half-mast. She waited as her eyes adjusted, but because the house was aligned east–west it was still rather dark inside. Then she took in her surroundings. All the surfaces were covered with models: aeroplanes, battleships and tanks.

  ‘You’ll be wanting to know more about that dreadful business next door. Young Amy Bernhard.’ The whites of his knuckles showed as he pressed the topside of the small plastic ship onto its hull. ‘I don’t know what the world’s coming to.’

  Gemma hurried on. ‘Can you tell me about the person you saw in the garden? The one you mention in your statement.’

  ‘Just over there he was.’ Mr Forde pointed through the venetians with the plastic destroyer.

  Gemma went to the window. Dead flies lay along the sill and small patches of cobweb filled the lower corners of the pane.

  ‘I’m particularly interested in what you saw that night, Mr Forde,’ she said. ‘Can you point out exactly where the person was?’ She strained but could see no bushes. ‘You said the person was crouched in bushes. I can’t see anything like bushes from here.’

  She straightened up again. Forde was looking distinctly uneasy. He put the plastic battleship down, then picked it up again, fiddling with it.

  ‘You won’t see from there.’

  ‘Where did you see from?’

  Did he make the whole thing up, Gemma wondered. Some people would do anything to feel part of something, even an investigation into a missing person. Made them feel important. ‘Are you sure you saw someone that night?’

  His face shifted, irritation. ‘Of course I did.’

  Gemma waited, letting the silence build the tension.

  ‘I saw it from upstairs.’

  ‘I’d like you to show me.’

  ‘What? Go upstairs?’

  For a moment, Gemma was spooked. Did he have his mummified old mother up there? Would he come after her with the carving knife like Norman Bates in Psycho?

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I want to go upstairs and have a look.’

  ‘But why? What good will that do? There’s nothing to see now.’

  Don’t be too sure of that, sport, Gemma thought, sure now that Forde was hiding something. He shrugged and put the model destroyer down on a table near the window and, in silence, Gemma followed him up a flight of stairs and along a corridor until they came to a half-open door.

  ‘This is my bedroom,’ said Forde. His tone was plaintive but she walked in and looked around. A dark, cramped space—a single bed, a wardrobe and a chest of drawers surmounted by a cedar mirror on a small stand. A
large table pressed against the flowery curtains hanging on each side of the window. Strange place to put a table, Gemma thought, as she tried to lean across it to look outside. ‘You saw the prowler out of this window?’ Her disbelief was evident.

  Forde nodded.

  ‘Not with this table here.’ She made it sound more of a statement than a question. Forde seemed to have shrunk further since coming upstairs; she was reminded of a snail pulling back into itself.

  ‘It wasn’t there that night.’ Now he sounded sulky.

  ‘Can you help me move it then, because you couldn’t have seen anything out of the window with that standing in the way.’

  Silently, the two of them lifted the table away and Gemma noticed the deep impressions left in the carpet by the table legs. Even now, standing close to the window, she could barely see any of the hedge and bushes that separated the properties. She stood on tiptoe. That gave her a slightly better vantage point. Gemma did a few rough spatial calculations. She worked out that the window towards the back of the house next door belonged to Amy Bernhard’s bedroom. But unless she was able to get higher up—stand on a table, for instance—she wasn’t able to see over the fence between the properties.

  She turned back to Mr Forde, who stood in the doorway, his hands in his pockets. ‘In your statement, Mr Forde, you said you were changing a light bulb. Can you please show me which one you meant?’

  Forde looked around the room as if the shaded light fitting had the habit of moving around and appearing in unexpected positions. Finally he pointed to the shaded light hanging in the middle of the room.

  ‘That one?’ Gemma moved to stand under it, then looked towards the window. ‘But you can’t see out the window from here! What did you mean?’

  ‘I pulled the table over to reach it. And I could see from up there.’ Forde fidgeted with a button on his shirt, twisting it. ‘You can see from up there,’ he indicated the light fitting, ‘if you’re standing on the table.’

  ‘And which room was the intruder outside?’ Gemma peered out again, trying to see the hedge near Amy’s room.

  ‘He was crouched down there. In the bushes outside her bedroom.’

  ‘Are you sure it was this window you looked from? I don’t mean to badger you, Mr Forde, but I want to get it clear in my head. If you were standing on the table in the middle of the room, I don’t see how it would be possible to see out the window at all. Let alone be able to see someone down there in those bushes over the fence.’

  ‘I’m taller than you. So I can see down there better than you.’ He was rattled. ‘I want to go back downstairs now. I’m in the middle of making something, you know.’ His voice had become querulous. ‘I don’t like being interrupted.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Gemma, stepping back from the window. ‘That’s very helpful. Let me give you a hand putting the table back. Where does it normally stand?’

  ‘No need for that,’ he said. ‘I just pushed it over when I was doing the carpets earlier. Like I said, it’s not usually there at all.’

  This must be the only room that Mr Forde does any housework in, Gemma thought, following him downstairs again, the information she’d just absorbed going round in her mind. This time, instead of leading her back through the house, he headed her off near the front door. ‘You’ve seen what you came for. You must excuse me,’ he said. ‘I’m rather busy just now.’

  ‘Of course. You’ve been most helpful.’ More than you know, pal, she thought.

  She walked outside and heard the front door close behind her. In this job, it’s a shame but we always assume the worst of everyone, she thought. Not a nice character trait. But niceness doesn’t get them arrested and put away. She wondered just how many neighbours knew which bedroom was which in the house next door. Not only did Mr Forde know where Amy slept, but he was lying through his teeth about that table. And Gemma knew why. She thought of Angie’s workload; her own wasn’t any lighter. She needed to talk to Kosta.

  Scrolling down to his number, she rang him, leaving a message asking him for any information about an Eddie who worked at Deliverance. She was also curious to discover if he knew anything about the man with the diamond stud.

  She turned off William Street into Macleay, taking a detour on her way home, her senses stimulated by the biscuity odour of cooking. She suddenly longed for ice-cream in a cone. She found a parking spot on Macleay Street; the late afternoon sun still hot and making rainbows in the fine spray from the El Alamein fountain.

  Across the road at the ice-cream shop, a family group were walking out, licking their cones, the kids’ ones piled high and sprinkled with hundreds and thousands. The mother and father, arms around each other, swapped ice-creams. Then the father noticed ice-cream dripping from the chin of the smallest of the children and quickly wiped it off before it could fall on his clothes. The adults laughed together and then kissed in that easy well-oiled way that long-time couples have. Gemma felt a pang of jealousy. Why didn’t she have a nice husband like that and a couple of happy kids? She looked again at the family group. Then she looked closer and, in that moment, the man swung round and made eye contact. Too late Gemma turned away. Oh my God, she thought. It can’t be. It’s not possible. It mustn’t be.

  But it was.

  •

  Back home, she tried to take her mind off what she’d just seen at Kings Cross by making a detailed study of Mannix Romero’s CV. He’d been educated at Bathurst, she read, worked in one of the local banks as a clerk for five years before going back to college and training as a teacher. Then he’d taught History and English at Bathurst High School before resigning after seven years and apparently leaving the public system. He’d spent twenty years working in two private schools before joining the staff at Netherleigh Park some years previously. She made a note of the two private schools—St Angelica’s in Bowral and Boronia House in the lower Blue Mountains—jotting down the office phone numbers.

  There was nothing immediate or obvious in the pattern of his employment history to excite her suspicion. But she’d definitely check up; find out why he’d left his last jobs. If there was a breath of scandal surrounding Mannix Romero, Gemma was determined she’d sniff it out.

  •

  After another night with the Glock under the pillow, Gemma rose early to hear the Ratbag still snoring gently. After she’d showered and dressed, she and Taxi had breakfast under the big sun umbrella, watching the nor’easter wrinkle the sea. She barely tasted her toast and marmalade, haunted by what she’d seen yesterday evening outside the ice-cream shop and what she was going to do about it, her mind compulsively going over and over it, until it almost pushed aside the notice of a murder contract. She went into her office and waited while her email messages downloaded. Her email program sounded and she opened her inbox. Most of it was junk about penis enlargement, cheap Viagra and Zanax or offers of pornography. She went through, deleting them. She wasn’t fast enough for one though and it started opening on her screen. If you want to know what happened to Amy and Tasmin, check this website, said the summary. There was no name in the sender field. Gemma’s heart beat hard as she clicked on the link www.xxxtremelycuteschoolgirls.com and waited for the website to unfold. She was disappointed. This page cannot be displayed, said her browser. Gemma tried again, using variations of the website’s name. Her search engines came up with similar material—over twelve thousand references. Checking each of those just wasn’t possible; she’d get Mike to see if he could trace the sender instead. Meanwhile, she sent the email onto Angie. It could be a crank, but someone had taken the trouble to find Gemma’s email address. And she wanted to know who that someone was.

  The Ratbag shuffled out, still half asleep heading straight to the fridge, until she sent him to have a shower, promising to make him scrambled eggs. After he’d showered, he ate them and then another three slices of toast spread thickly with peanut butter as
well as two more with honey before helping her with some pruning, chopping away at the scrubby bushes below the timber deck and cutting back an old lemon tree that Gemma had never known to bear fruit. As she piled the offcuts into bundles and tied them up, she found herself thinking again of what she’d seen outside the ice-cream shop.

  She woke the next morning with the scene still in her mind. What a way to start the week, she thought.

  The doorbell sounded later and she looked up to see Mike’s burly figure taking up a lot of room on the CCTV monitor. She went to the door to let him in and stood back as he entered, noticed that he was avoiding eye contact. ‘Mike,’ she said before he could start unpacking his camera, ‘can you please come into my office and have a look at something that came in last night?’

  ‘Sure,’ he said, briefly meeting her eyes.

  She pulled up the email that contained the schoolgirls’ website address. He leaned over, frowning at the message on her screen. ‘Open it and let’s have a look,’ he said.

  ‘That’s just it,’ she said. ‘The website’s been taken down. There is no website.’

  ‘Do you think it’s a genuine tip-off?’

  Gemma shrugged. ‘Can’t say. But I sure want to check it out.’

  Mike peered closer. ‘The email’s from anonymous at Hotmail,’ he said. ‘It’ll be hard to trace. We can only try.’ He paused. ‘There are a couple of reports hanging over from last week that I need to write up. That real estate job—the one Spinner was doing, checking out the neighbours for the interested buyers?’ He pulled out a diskette. ‘These are Spinner’s notes. Looks like they’ll be buying next to the neighbours from hell if they go ahead.’

  He indicated her laptop and held out the diskette. Gemma didn’t take it. ‘Mike. We have to talk.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  She finally took the diskette from him and put it on the desk. Mike picked it up again, fiddling with it, glancing at her. ‘I’m getting plenty of other work. I can hand in my notice. I think that’s the best thing to do.’