Before There Were Angels

by Sarah Mathews

  “Surely,” I said, standing aside.

  “This is Officer Ricardo Nielsen.”

  “Hi there.”

  We walked into the living room.

  “Has there been any progress?” I asked.

  Martinez shook his head sadly. “Not a lot. We have had a whole squad devoted to the case but we can find no trace of the most likely suspects, who are Martha DeGamo or your ex-wife, Rafaella or Claire Parsons or Claire Allendale, or whatever she is calling herself nowadays. Mrs. DeGamo has disappeared without trace and we are assuming Rafaella is still living in England because we have no record of her having entered the US.”

  “We can’t find her in England either,” I said. “All her official records that we can gain access to give her home address as our home address but she left there nearly six months ago and nobody knows where she went to. I have been checking with mutual friends and they don’t know where she is either, or if they do, they are not saying. It is almost as if she has gone Black Ops or died. Personally I prefer the latter.”

  Neither officer laughed.

  “It’s pretty much the same story with Martha DeGamo,” Martinez continued earnestly. “Maybe she’s dead too. She could have killed herself after she shot her entire family but no unclaimed body has turned up anywhere.”

  “I didn’t know it was so easy to disappear,” I said.

  “Tens of thousands of illegal immigrants disappear without trace every year,” Officer Nielsen replied. “It’s a big country. It’s a big world. And a lot of countries over there in Europe don’t even have border controls.”

  “That bit I know,” I smiled.

  “The best way to find people is not from official records but from financial records. People have to take money along with them eventually unless they empty their bank accounts so as to avoid being traced. Then you know that they are deliberately in hiding. Martha DeGamo hasn’t withdrawn anything from any bank accounts that we can find since the murders and we can’t find a single record of a financial transaction, or even application, relating to her. We really think she may be dead.”

  “So the two main suspects are dead, are they?” I quipped. “That doesn’t advance the situation very much, especially as one of them seems to have killed from beyond the grave.”

  “One of them will turn up eventually,” Martinez observed. “It is too early yet. Lots of people disappear for a while, then, when they believe no-one is looking for them anymore, they get careless. It is a question of waiting for that to happen. Dead people don’t kill other people, so whoever did this to your son is alive, they’re just invisible for now. We spend a lot of time waiting for that tell-tale little blip to appear on our computer screens. Everything is electronic nowadays. We do a lot of physical things to reassure the public that we are doing something, but the reality in these cases is that we are looking for an electronic transaction of some kind.”

  I changed the subject because there was nowhere further for this line of thought to go. “You don’t have anyone trailing Stevie to school and back again by any chance?”

  The two officers looked puzzled. “No,” confirmed Martinez. “Why, is somebody following him around?”

  “Yes, a woman. Blonde. Thirties to forties.”

  “Have you spoken to her?”

  “We have tried but she has a spectacular ability to disappear when we get close to her.”

  “How do you lose her?” asked Nielsen.

  “Don’t ask me,” I said. “She literally disappears into thin air or down an alleyway or something. We can’t explain it.”

  “Not so many alleyways in San Francisco,” Nielsen mused.

  “No, you are right.”

  “See if you can get a photograph of her,” suggested Martinez. “Maybe we can work from there.”

  “But she is definitely not one of yours?”

  “No, definitely not.”

  “OK, I’ll try a photograph instead. I don’t know how she can avoid that.”

  “In this case anything is possible,” commented Martinez wryly.

  “True that,” agreed Nielsen. “This is the weirdest case I have ever been involved in. Three suspects now and they all seem to be ghosts.”

  * * *

  We tried to take photos of Stevie’s shadow, all of us, but we couldn’t manage to capture a single image of her. We took them from behind, from the side and from the front, but it was as if she wasn’t there. As we got more frustrated, we became more obvious about it. She smiled for several of the shots with a quirky compliant-cum-triumphal look, and she posed for a couple, but all we got was the scenery behind her, not even a shaft of light or a reflection to suggest she had ever been there.

  So we concluded that she must have been a ghost or some kind of astral projection, which accentuated our initial questions of who she was and why she was there.

  We finally managed to get Luiz Martinez to release pictures of Martha DeGamo but it wasn’t her. She was the right profile in terms of age, coloring, race, weight and height but she didn’t look like her.

  Officer Neilsen also became intrigued by the mystery and took to following her around as well, and he was as baffled as we were when she always disappeared having tailed Stevie to his school or back to his home.

  She never said anything, she never betrayed any specific emotion beyond that teasing smile of hers as we took full-frontal pictures of her, she never tried to avoid us during the procession to and from the school, and she seemed to walk much as any other person walks although very quietly, and maybe silently.

  Could Martha DeGamo disguise herself, could Rafaella disguise herself, and if she was neither of these two women, who the hell was she?

  One day, however, she dropped a note into the road, a note that was eagerly picked up by Belle who was following her that day, and then immediately checked by Officer Nielsen who was following Belle. It read:

  I am Genevieve Giraud. Now go away!

  You are making a spectacle of all of us.

  That told us, but not much. Who was Genevieve Giraud and was she even telling us the truth? Nor did her note explain why she was escorting Stevie, why it would matter that we were making a spectacle of ourselves (as we undoubtedly were), and whether she was, bluntly, friend or foe.

  Before leaving Belle that day, and after losing Genevieve Giraud yet again somewhere in the vicinity of the school, Ricardo Nielsen almost shook his head off in puzzlement as he gyrated it vigorously from side to side.

  “This case beats it all,” he said. “I know you have suffered the tragic loss of a child but I am beginning to see the funny side. Somebody is messing with us. I don’t know how they are doing it but they must be doing it. This is crazy stuff. You can’t reach out and touch anything, and yet a twelve year old child is dead and that is terrible. I’ll make some investigations into who Genevieve Giraud might be and get back to you. Almost certainly the name is made up and we’re heading towards another dead end, but then again - who knows? - it might lead to something.”

  Belle was outraged when she got home. “Zack is dead and Officer Nielsen is looking on the funny side,” she spluttered.

  “He can’t really have said that,” I replied.

  “He did. He said exactly that.”

  “I have to agree that it must seem ridiculous to him, and frustrating. And he had no idea who Genevieve Giraud might be?”

  “None at all. He said he would dig. I am not optimistic about the outcome. He will probably be too busy laughing.”

  I hugged Belle. She was resistant at first, assuming that I was about to patronize her, but finally melted into me.

  “You have to agree it is perplexing,” I said, “and the San Fran police are mostly used to dealing with petty crimes, cakes and coffee. Ghosts following people down the street must be completely outside his experience, murderers too. I don’t think this situation is funny. I think it is extremely dangerous, but it is bizarre, and that is all I am sure he is saying.”

  “He sh
ould pick his words more carefully,” she said.

  “Yes, I agree. It was an unfortunate choice of words. Come on, let’s relax for a bit.”

  * * *

  There was no relaxation that night, though. No sooner had we gone to bed and Stevie settled down in the attic, than something smashed in the kitchen.

  “George?” Belle and I shouted out together.

  There was another crash which sounded like glasses, followed by a whole pile of plates breaking singly.

  I jumped out of bed and rushed downstairs to see if George was chasing a cat, was being pursued by a mosquito or had contracted rabies.

  I found him in the sitting room looking distinctly alarmed and he rushed up the stairs to our bedroom as I entered the kitchen.

  It looked like a building site and a very dangerous one for someone with bare feet.

  “What the fuck …?” I exclaimed and then leaped in the air as Belle came in behind me and put her arms around my waist.

  “All our things!” she said. “Who has done this? Why?”

  “It wasn’t George,” I said.

  “No, I know it wasn’t George, but it must have been someone.”

  We then heard things breaking in our bedroom and George tore down the stairs again to the accompaniment of the sound of sheets being ripped – neatly in two, as it turned out.

  Belle and I raced each other up the stairs to find a snowstorm of feathers and a snowscape of bed coverings about to be ignited by overturned candles and lamps.

  “Who turned the lights on?” Belle asked. “What is going on?”

  “It looks like they are intent on burning down the house. We had better keep an eye on anything that could cause a flame.”

  Sure enough, five minutes later we could smell the rancid odor of hot oil cooking in the kitchen. Belle abandoned her cleaning up of the bedroom to head for the door. I held her back.

  “This is hot oil we are dealing with here. Be careful. We don’t want it being hurled all over us.” I grabbed two towels from the bathroom and soaked them. “It’s not much protection but they might help put out the flames.”

  “Remember there’s a fire extinguisher behind the door.”

  “If it is still there,” I muttered grimly.

  I tiptoed down the stairs, watching for any movement in the kitchen. Instead I saw smoke billowing up and the reflection of flames in the high gloss paint on the walls of the hallway.

  “Get out of the house,” I shouted to Belle, “and get Stevie out too. Then call 911.”

  George was standing in the hallway barking ferociously - yes, ferociously not frenziedly. He wasn’t afraid of the smoke and the flames, he was angry with an intruder.

  I jumped the last steps and raced to the front door. Belle and Stevie would be coming down the external fire escape. I threw open the door, which made the flames burn even more enthusiastically, and demanded that George leave the house. Eventually I had to grab him by the collar and haul him out.

  I wrapped a wet towel around my waist as I closed the door behind me and draped the other one over my shoulders. San Francisco is rarely cold and they would have to do for a while. The thought crossed my mind, what if the house burns down entirely? I will have no clothes.

  Belle and Stevie were descending the last steps of the fire escape and we hugged each other, relieved that we had all got out alive.

  Belle had phoned the fire department from the top of the fire escape and the first fire engine arrived within about two minutes. San Francisco is paranoid about fires breaking out in the city after what happened in 1906 when the city was virtually razed to the ground.

  It took them only another ten minutes or so to get the fire under control. The damage was mainly confined to the kitchen and hallway, but the kitchen itself was gutted and we knew that the smell of smoke would linger for weeks to come. It would smell like hell itself and that effect might have been intended.

  The firemen were confused to find so much mess across the kitchen floor. Was someone having a fight in there and accidentally managed to knock over a pan of cooking oil?

  No, we said, there was no fight. All the glasses and plates seemed to have been smashed by an intruder who must also have started the fat fire and trashed out bedroom upstairs. This didn’t make a lot of sense to the firemen and we assured them that it didn’t make any more sense to us either.

  “Are you well insured?” one fireman asked us as if he was on to something.

  “We are insured,” I replied but I don’t know if we are well insured.”

  “It looks like the fire was started deliberately,” he said.

  “Yes, it does,” we agreed.

  He scrutinized us suspiciously, holding our gazes in a momentary silence that was clearly meant to be inquisitorial. “You agree?”

  “Yes, we agree,” I said.

  “So who started it?”

  “That we don’t know,” I replied. “Not one of us.”

  “So someone came into your house to break up your kitchen and bedroom, and then set fire to the house?”

  “So it would seem,” I said.

  “Do you know who this person is?”

  “No, we haven’t got a clue.”

  “What room was hit first?”

  “The kitchen. Then, when we rushed down to the kitchen, they trashed our bedroom, and when we returned to our bedroom, they set fire to the kitchen.”

  The fireman eyed me suspiciously. “Didn’t you see them on the stairs?”

  “No, neither saw them nor heard them.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense. How else would they get up and down the stairs?”

  “The inside staircase is the only way,” I confirmed.

  “But you didn’t see them or hear them?”

  “No.”

  “How did they get out of the bedroom? Are there two sets of doors?”

  “As it happens, yes. One set in the bedroom itself and another leading from the en suite bathroom onto the landing, but that is usually locked.”

  “So you went in and he or she slipped out the other way?”

  “Possibly,” I said. “That would be one scenario. But as I say, that door is usually locked and the key left downstairs in the kitchen. If they took the key with them upstairs, they are a lot better at recognizing it than we are.”

  “And the other scenario?”

  “That they were silent and invisible.”

  The fireman wasn’t expecting that answer. He probably thought I had been affected by the smoke and promptly ushered us to an ambulance that had arrived to be checked over medically.

  “I suggest you talk to Officer Martinez or Officer Nielsen at the local police station,” I shouted over my shoulder. “They will explain. Well, they won’t explain the phenomenon but they should be able to explain our predicament, and I am not sure we can even do that. Believe it or not, we seem to be under attack from an unseen force.”

  I had said too much. The fireman turned away and started to address his colleagues. I couldn’t hear what he said but I could detect scorn in his voice and once or twice laughter seeped out from the group.

  I had to hand it to Rafaella, she had managed to scare us and humiliate us in one flaming stroke. I didn’t think she was intending to kill us but it might not have bothered her too much if either Stevie or George had died. Belle and I she wanted to hang around a lot longer, I got the impression, and maybe ‘hang’ was the operative word.

  How did I know it was Rafaella? Because I heard her call out from the kitchen as I sprinted between the bottom of the stairs and the front door - “Hello, Luke.”

  There again, I could have been imagining it and I could have been turning psychotic. However, I suspected there was only one psychotic person in our immediate surroundings and I had just caught a glimpse of her looking down at us from the window in Stevie’s old room. She may even have waved.

  Rafaella was having fun. She was fiddling as we burned.

  Chapter 20

  Of
ficers Martinez and Nielsen returned to our house within a few hours of the fire. They were looking pre-occupied and frustrated. Things were not adding up in their minds, or if they were with regard to our particular situation, they were not adding up with their world view. And if they could come to terms with the idea of some paranormal force murdering a boy and setting fire to the house, there was no way they could say that in the cold rational light of a police report. ‘Death by paranormal malice aforethought’ - you can just see that on the page and the effect on their careers of putting it there.

  And yet, there was Genevieve Giraud following Stevie to and from school and there was definitely something inexplicable about her, Ricardo Nielsen knew that first hand.

  So, that early morning, Officers Martinez and Nielsen were suffering from a severe hangover caused by cognitive dissonance on a transcendental scale.

  “Do you mind if we go through all this again?” asked Martinez. “It sure is smoky in here.”

  I laughed. “It’s a disaster. Belle’s gone off for a walk in the park. She cannot bear the smell and she is very upset at what happened last night.”

  “I can understand that. So,” continued Martinez, “the most obvious explanation from what you are saying is that there is an intruder who murdered Zack, and another or the same intruder who deliberately started this fire last night in your kitchen.”

  “Correct.”

  “But you have no real idea who this intruder is or whether it is the same one or different ones …”

  “I am fairly convinced it is Rafaella but I have no proof of that.”

  “What makes you think it is your ex-wife?” Nielsen asked, leaning forward.

  “She is the only person I can think of with a motive.” I couldn’t bring myself to tell the officers that I had seen Rafaella in Stevie’s bedroom. It was too early in the morning to discuss her as a paranormal projection, and describing how I had discovered her as a living, breathing being in Stevie’s bedroom without telling either Belle or the police, was going to be a nightmare to sort out, starting with stark incredulity and ending in abject fury if I actually persuaded them to believe me of the, ‘You saw Rafaella in our house, in Stevie’s bedroom, and you didn’t even tell me? Our whole family was in immediate danger from this woman and you kept quiet about it?’ variety. I would be lucky to be allowed to stay in the house after that.