Gemma clicked on ‘foreplay’, a ten-second tease to encourage viewers to cough up the details of their credit cards. The action started, the old in-and-out at every orifice, tight male buttocks, straining cocks, splayed female legs, eyes closed shut and mouth open wide in simulated ecstasy. Or anguish, Gemma thought. It’s not possible to distinguish between those two emotional states from facial expressions. The jerky sound of the faulty streaming, the usual endearments—slut, bitch, cunt, whore . . . The footage fell short of any climax scene. Presumably the close-ups of the cum shots, the money shots, would have to be paid for. Gemma played it again. This time she knew there was no doubt as to who the girl in the video was. It was Amy Bernhard.
On the way back to her car, Gemma called Angie but got only her voice mail. She passed on to Julie Cooper the suspicion she was forming that Amy Bernhard had been at the bus stop the day she disappeared, but it seemed that she’d had other plans for that day and had probably never caught the bus at all.
Gemma rang off, wondering. Amy had her make-up bag with here. Where was she planning to go?
•
Gemma banged on Claudia Page’s door, stood back, waiting to hear footsteps. Finally the door opened. When Claudia saw who it was, her eyes flickered with anxiety.
‘I know about the secret, Claudia!’ said Gemma quietly as she barged in. ‘I know what Amy and Tasmin were up to. And you did too!’
She looked around ‘Your mother in?’
Claudia shook her head. ‘She should be home soon. She’s having dinner with friends.’
Gemma continued: ‘And I know why you didn’t sit with her that day on the bus, you and Tasmin.’
Claudia hunched against the wall. There was a silence and Gemma felt the triumph of knowing she was right.
‘Amy didn’t ever get on the bus! She told you at the bus stop that she wasn’t going to school and you spread rumours to cover her. You told Tiffany Brown that she’d left the school grounds. Why, Claudia? Why all these lies?’
Claudia’s eyes were huge. Fear dilated her pupils so that she looked like some hunted nocturnal creature. ‘I had to. I couldn’t tell on her. I pretended she’d come to school like any other day. But then, when she disappeared—’
‘She’d asked you to cover for her?’
Claudia nodded. ‘We write our own notes. We can all forge our mothers’ signatures. Amy was going to give me one, but in all the excitement that morning, she’d forgotten.’ She faltered. ‘And then, when it seemed that something bad had happened to her, it was too late. I was really scared that I’d be blamed. I know that sounds awful and selfish.’
‘At least it’s honest,’ said Gemma.
‘And Tasmin made me swear never to tell anyone about Amy. Because then it would spoil it for her. Just because Ames had run away. Or whatever.’
The two of them stood in silence. Gemma noticed a hall table where tall exotic lilies in a huge bronze urn spiked the air, filling the house with the smell of the tropics.
‘It’s the “whatever” that worries me, Claudia,’ said Gemma. ‘It was the “whatever” that killed her.’ She’d almost said ‘them’ but she wasn’t sure if Tasmin’s death had been made public yet. She hardened her voice. ‘You must tell me everything you know.’
Claudia seemed distracted. ‘I thought she’d run away at first. She said she was going away with someone. The man who’d helped them set up the website.’
‘Who is he?’
Claudia shook her head. ‘Some guy. Old enough to be her father. He had a crush on her, she said. Told me he was stalking her.’
A long pause while Gemma noted this down and considered it. A stalker. Despite the letter and his telescope, that didn’t sound like Mr Romero. He didn’t need to stalk. A teacher had the right to be present in a student’s life for hours a day.
‘A letter was found in Mr Romero’s possession,’ she said, ‘a sort of love letter signed by someone using the initials AB.’ As she spoke, she sensed the tension building in Claudia. ‘Do you know anything about that?’
Claudia looked down at her mauve-painted nails.
‘That was Amy,’ she said finally. ‘She thought Mr Romero had the hots for her. She thought it would be fun to tease him. Her idea was to invite him to a meeting at the beach and then hide and watch to see if he came.’
‘And if he did?’
Claudia shrugged. ‘I guess she would know she was right.’
Fatherless girls, Gemma thought. Without knowing what they’re doing, they put themselves in risky situations. She should know.
‘But once Amy was found dead! Surely you could have spoken up then—about what you knew? It was a murder investigation!’ Gemma wanted to shake her.
Claudia slumped against the wall. Her long hair hid her face like a curtain and when she pushed it back, Gemma saw the tears spilling from her lashes. Gemma collected herself. It was too easy, she thought, to dump it all on this frightened adolescent. Amy was not her responsibility. None of the adults in these girls’ lives had taken enough real notice of what the girls had been up to.
‘Let’s go and sit down,’ Gemma said. ‘I’m sorry I said that. It was out of order. It was you who sent me that anonymous email with the address of that website, wasn’t it?’
Claudia nodded.
‘You were trying to help. But you wanted to stay hidden at the same time,’ said Gemma softly.
Again the girl nodded, brushing the tears from her eyes. Poor kid, Gemma thought. In over her head with nowhere to turn and no one to talk to.
‘I’ll leave if you want me to,’ she said.
‘No,’ the girl whispered. ‘It’s okay. I want to talk to someone about it. I feel relieved that someone knows. I didn’t know what to do.’
They walked through to the huge conservatory area where the palms conspired to make odd shadows against the walls. Several mysteries had been resolved quite simply, Gemma thought. Romero had been telling the truth. Amy Bernhard hadn’t shown up for the meeting with him for the simple reason that she hadn’t been at school that day. Although she still had severe misgivings regarding Romero’s use of the telescope for ‘anatomical accuracy’, his story of being held up in traffic was quite possibly true.
‘When you feel okay,’ Gemma said, ‘tell me everything you know.’ She sat herself on a chair while Claudia slid down onto the rug-covered floor, leaning against an oversized sofa. Gemma took out her notebook. ‘It’s time for you to share the burden of everything you know about the secret.’
Claudia dragged a little sequined bag over towards her and pulled out a packet of cigarettes. She offered one to Gemma who shook her head, waiting while the girl lit it and inhaled deeply.
‘Everything was okay at the beginning,’ she said, as smoke curled around her beautiful face. ‘It was just fun. At first, I even considered joining them on the first website. Getting a webcam and linking up. I took some of the pictures that are on it. Then Amy and Tasmin really got into the webcam thing. They set up a fan club so that people who found the website when they were online could email their responses. Some of the responses were so freaky they decided to start a Dickhead of the Week thing. I didn’t want to be involved in that. I thought it was silly.’ Claudia looked away, miserable. ‘That’s when it started to go out of control.’ She put her head in her hands. ‘It’s all my fault.’
‘I don’t think so,’ said Gemma, gently taking the cigarette from between her fingers and putting it safely down on the ashtray.
‘The guy who’d given them the money for the website offered them modelling work,’ continued Claudia. ‘He claimed he was a friend of Amy’s father. Just a few photo shoots. Amy got very excited. And so did Tasmin.’
Gemma scribbled a note to check Andrew Bernhard again. ‘Who is this guy?’ she asked.
Claudia picked up the cigarette from where G
emma had placed it. ‘I guessed it was the man from the club. The one who used to let them in free.’
‘Which club was that?’ said Gemma, wondering if she knew the name already.
‘A place called Deliverance. They told me they’d started to put video streaming on a link to their website. But they wouldn’t tell me what it was showing. They’d changed the name too, so that I couldn’t find them straightaway even if I’d been looking. Around then, they started having money to splash around. New clothes, new make-up. They kept putting pressure on me to come in on it too.’
‘But you didn’t want to?’
‘I thought about it. I wanted money. I even went to an interview with the boss.’
‘And?’
‘That made up my mind for me. He was a total sleaze.’
‘Name?’
‘Vernon. Vernon something.’
‘Can you tell me what he looked like?’
Claudia shrugged. ‘Sort of old. Big fat thing. Purple face.’
‘Colouring?’ Gemma asked.
‘Not much hair left. Big eyebrows.’
Gemma noted these details down with the name while Claudia continued. ‘I tried to tell Ames and Taz to get out. But they wouldn’t.’ She inhaled on her cigarette and it caught in her throat, causing a fit of coughing. After the coughing subsided, she stubbed the cigarette out in the square marble ashtray. ‘They didn’t seem to mind that he was a sleazebag. I think by then they were smoking too much dope—maybe doing other drugs. And they loved having money. They spent heaps on clothes. Designer things. In the past, we used to get together to do our homework. All that stopped. They just weren’t interested in school anymore.’
Claudia pulled a gold chain out from under her light sleeveless top. At the end of it was a caged black pearl. ‘Ames bought me this. It’s Versace. She bought herself a Versace watch. Told her mother it was a Taiwanese clone.’ She fiddled with the pearl, rattling it softly in its filigree cage. ‘Guess how much this cost?
‘Didn’t anyone notice?’ Gemma asked. ‘Jewellery? All those new clothes?’
Claudia shrugged. ‘Amy’s mother was too busy fighting with the cowboy.’
‘Eric Stokes?’
Claudia nodded. ‘And Taz got away with it by telling her mum that her father gave her the money.’
All the lies necessary, thought Gemma, to protect the dangerous lifestyle the girls were starting to embrace. And still nobody really noticed.
‘You know nothing at all about this man who helped with the website?’
‘No.’ Claudia frowned. ‘Only that he used to work as a bodyguard to Vernon a long time ago.’
‘What about Vernon? Where did you meet him?’
‘In a café. At the Cross. That big one on the corner. He even tried to paw me then.’ Claudia made a face. ‘He was disgusting. Yuk.’ She shuddered. ‘He had this big gorilla of a bodyguard with him that day too.’
Gemma wrote down, Vernon and Gorilla bodyguard. ‘Did you get the bodyguard’s name?’
‘He called him Eddie.’
Gemma recalled that the Ratbag had offended an Eddie associated with Deliverance. Could it be one and the same person?
‘Go on,’ she said. ‘You were talking about the money the girls were making. And the website.’
‘Yes. I tracked down the website—even though they’d changed the name—and saw the Black Diamond hyperlink to the second site. It was credit card entry but they had a few seconds of video as a teaser. That’s all I needed to see to know what was going on.’
‘I’ve seen it too,’ said Gemma.
Claudia looked up. ‘So you know what it’s like.’ She paused. ‘We had a huge fight about it. I told them they were just being used by a bunch of pornographers. I reminded them that they were both under-age. And then she went missing.’ Claudia sniffed back tears. ‘She’d always said one day she’d just run away to Queensland and live with her father. I thought maybe that’s where she’d gone. Or gone off somewhere with this guy who had the hots for her. But when we didn’t hear anything from her, we started getting scared. Tasmin made me swear not to say anything about it. She was really scared of Amy’s stepfather too.’
Gemma thought of Eric Stokes and his dark self-righteousness. Fathers kill daughters in some cultures, she was thinking, if they break the rules.
‘What was she scared of?’
‘She knew he wanted to make trouble for Amy’s mother after they split up. And that he’d use her, Tasmin, too if he could. Taz was getting more unreliable and moody.’ Claudia looked away, as if seeing it all somewhere else, in a parallel world that only she knew about. ‘Plus she had stars in her eyes about some bloke. He was promising her the world. She wasn’t seeing straight. He was in his forties!’
‘God,’ said Gemma, trying to keep her face straight. ‘That’s practically geriatric.’
‘She was totally in love with him. Wanted to leave school. Said he’d said she could live with him and get heaps of modelling work.’ She paused, raising her beautiful eyes to Gemma. ‘It wasn’t modelling work he was thinking about.’
She pulled out another cigarette. ‘I couldn’t tell anyone. I would have been in too much trouble. I know it sounds selfish but I couldn’t afford to be expelled from school. Not coming up to the HSC year. I had to think of my mother and how she’d go ballistic. Then it all got worse and I got really scared. I thought the best thing to do would be to stay silent and send you the website details. Then I felt better about it. Like I’d taken action. Done the right thing.’
Gemma patted her knee. ‘It was the right thing, Claudia,’ she said.
‘Now I’m really, really scared. Amy’s dead. And Taz’s gone missing.’
‘But you weren’t involved in the website,’ said Gemma. ‘You weren’t involved in making those pornographic videos.’
‘I know. But I’m part of the group.’ Her eyes brimmed. ‘Whoever killed Amy might come after me.’
‘That’s not very realistic.’ Gemma tried to comfort the girl.
‘Taz said something that frightens me—that they wanted me. That I had the look they wanted.’
She certainly had the look, Gemma thought. An outstanding beauty, cool and classical. Debasing that, for them, would be twice the fun.
‘Taz gave me something to mind,’ Claudia went on. ‘And the guy she had a crush on, he knows she gave it to me.’
Gemma was about to ask what it was when Claudia’s mobile rang. This time, after a couple of whispered words, she hurried from the room. Gemma tried to overhear what was said but couldn’t make out the low murmur. Was it the good-looking youth with the flashing smile who Gemma had seen upside down on the screen of the mobile the first time she’d interviewed Claudia? Gemma waited. If it was him, he seemed to have a lot to say. She wanted Claudia to hurry back, tell her about whatever it was that Tasmin had given her. If the killer knew that Claudia had something that might incriminate him, the girl was definitely in grave danger.
Minutes passed and Gemma started to feel uneasy. She walked over to where the marble paddock ended and looked through the door into the room Claudia had walked through. Gently, she pushed the door further open.
There was no one there.
‘Claudia?’ Gemma called, her voice echoing through the mansion, bouncing off marble and glass. She hurried through the unfamiliar rooms, checking downstairs. Then she quickened her pace, almost running upstairs. She knocked and entered door after door. She retraced her footsteps and ran downstairs again. This time she noticed what she’d failed to see before. The front door stood wide open.
‘Shit!’
She ran outside onto the street. Nothing. She ran a little distance one way, then the other. There was no one around, just the occasional car passing. A man walking a large black dog turned the corner and she
almost collided with him as she ran to check the next street. ‘Did you see anyone?’ she asked. ‘A young girl? Tall, dark-haired?’
‘No,’ he said, shaking his head, pulling the dog to heel.
Gemma thanked him and crossed to the other side of the street. But it was empty. She hurried back to the Page house, calling Angie on the way. ‘Claudia Page got a phone call while we were talking,’ she said to Angie as she searched through the house one more time, making sure Claudia wasn’t hiding away somewhere, flinging doors open again, rechecking bathrooms. ‘Then she left the house. Went from right under my nose. I didn’t even know she’d gone until too late.’
‘What do you mean, gone?’
‘One minute she was here talking to me, next minute she’d vanished. I checked out on the street. Only saw a man and his dog and he hadn’t seen anything.’
‘You think there was a connection between the phone call and her shooting through?’
‘It looks like it.’ Gemma passed on the information Claudia had given her. ‘She’s got a boyfriend, name unknown. I’ll ask around after him. And I’ve got a name for you—the man who interviewed her for modelling work. Vernon.’
‘Great. Is that the best you can do?’
‘He’s fat, old and disgusting, according to Claudia. Balding. And,’ she continued, ‘Amy Bernhard did write that love letter you found in Romero’s desk. Except it was a joke.’
‘Did Romero know that?’
‘How could he?’
‘I’ll check it out.’ Angie paused. ‘Any more on Vernon?’
‘He has a gorilla bodyguard, called Eddie.’
‘By the way, our techies are trying to trace the server of that Black Diamond website.’
‘It was pretty explicit,’ said Gemma.
‘Not the usual sort of activities on the syllabus at Netherleigh Park Ladies’ College,’ Angie agreed. ‘The techies are going overtime trying to get addresses from the girls’ own websites. Some of the email responses were pretty off. Oh,’ she added, ‘I’ve traced Sandra Samuels.’
For a second, Gemma was puzzled. Then she remembered the victim statement and the thief knot from the terrible gang rape.
Spiking the Girl Page 25
