Baby Did a Bad Bad Thing (2 page)

Gemma stayed up late watching television, lying the full length of the pale blue Italian leather sofa she’d bought
when she redecorated. Two fat club-style armchairs completed the suite, a couple of manila folders on one, and on the other, curled up like a plump striped cushion, her cat, Taxi. He raised his head and winked at her.

‘Come over here, you big fat thing,’ she commanded. Taxi didn’t even bother opening his eyes so Gemma grabbed him, collapsing back onto the sofa, the warm heavy cat draped across her stomach like a poultice.

The rain was heavier now, scudding and lashing across the timber deck outside the sliding doors beyond the dining table, the wind flailing it across the glass. The sense that all that separated her cosy nest from the seething, opaque darkness outside was a thin layer of fragile glass made her feel very vulnerable. In the last few months, Gemma had been aware of a heaviness in her, a feeling of oppression. When first aware of it, she’d put it down to the blues of autumn and now the cold of winter. Now, she wasn’t sure what it was about and wrapped a friendly old grey cardigan, one of Steve’s, more closely around her. She shoved Taxi aside, and hurried over to pull the curtains across, so that the blankness of the glass and the driving rain were hidden by brilliant blue, yellow, white and extremely expensive fabric. She shivered, but it was only a reflex. Nothing and no one could get in here, she thought, considering her sophisticated security system. Unless they knew the code, they’d have to dig a tunnel to get in.

But her sanctuary
had
been breached, at the speed of light, shooting through the optic fibre. And although words on a screen were nowhere near as menacing as a physical presence, each morning now for several days, she’d dreaded checking her email. She flopped back onto the sofa wishing the cyberstalker to hell. And wishing she’d never entered a chat room. Wasting time pretending to be someone she was not because she was bored one night. Silly, silly girl, she scolded herself. She’d talked to her friend, Detective Sergeant Angie McDonald, about it.

‘He’ll get bored after a while,’ Angie had told her. ‘And there’s not much we can do. He’s really only a digital address. I’ll talk to some of the whizz kids in Technical Services and see if they can come up with something.’ She’d shrugged. ‘Sorry, Gems.’

But the cyberstalker hadn’t got bored; instead, he’d upped the ante considerably.

•

Outside, the wind howled over the scrubby coastal vegetation and, somewhere, distant lightning jerked the picture on the television screen. The late news repeated the item that had been headlines earlier. Idly watching footage of a fire, Gemma suddenly sat up, her attention captured when she heard the name.

‘Philanthropist Benjamin Glass,’ said the reader, ‘whose house was completely destroyed in the blaze, has not been seen since the fire. Police suspect arson.’

Benjamin Glass, billionaire philanthropist, was hardly the sort of person who’d be setting fire to his property for the insurance money, Gemma thought. The reporter went on to say that Mr Glass’s good works were legendary. ‘The man is practically a saint,’ said a friend in a three-second grab.

The news finished, she switched off the television and picked up the manila folders on the armchair. These contained information on two new cases for Mercator Security and Business Advisers, Gemma’s company. Although mainly dealing with insurance fraud, the company also had a little sideline developed by Gemma in response to a need where, for a very reasonable price, suspicious spouses or lovers could check up on their partners. Or busy career women could check out a new man they were dating. For less than two hundred dollars, Gemma could get back to a client with basic information about the person of interest, that he was in fact who he said he was, that he lived and worked at the places he said, and that he was single and without a major criminal record. Or not as the case might be. No need even for a potentially embarrassing personal meeting, just credit details over the phone. All she needed was a name and a birthday. All this information was quite freely available, but the legal searches might take an inexperienced person the best part of a week; Gemma could ring back in twenty-four hours.

Already entered onto her PC files, the new folders would soon house any photographs, surveillance reports or other physical evidence that might be gathered. She read the clients’ names again. One was a woman, Minkie Montreau—Minkie—the funny name was vaguely familiar. Gemma pulled a face at the nickname, conjuring a spoilt brat-woman with a fur and a simper. The other was a Peter Greengate. She picked up Peter Greengate’s folder, opened it and shut it again. She recalled his voice on the phone. He’d sounded in a bad way, she thought. Quiet and desperate. She knew nothing about Minkie Montreau because Spinner had taken the call and made the initial entry. Spinner, her ace operative, was one of a staff of four, counting herself. From time to time Gemma still liked to get out on the road herself. She saw that Spinner had written a note under the woman’s name—‘
fatal fire
’ followed by a question mark. She frowned, wondering what that meant. And suddenly remembered Minkie Montreau. Fifteen years ago that name had been a well-known label and Minkie Montreau was
the
designer of expensive underwear and negligees in brilliant floral satins. Gemma remembered a magazine interview with the erstwhile university medallist who’d turned her engineering brilliance to the design of uplift bras and almost magical figure-trimming torsolettes for the less-than-perfect figure, which meant about ninety-five per cent of the market. But then she’d dropped out of sight. Now, Gemma thought, she’s probably just another hard-working Sydney businesswoman. Like me.

The big injection of money which had come to her from her father’s life insurance she’d put into state-of-the-art software, not to mention a complete refurbishment of her apartment, office and wardrobe, and it was beginning to pay off. Gemma’s security business, started seven years ago after she’d left the police service, was growing all the time and she had her fingers crossed, knowing she was one of only two left on the shortlist to pick up a huge contract with the Department of Social Security which would get her out of debt and guarantee her future expansion. A girlfriend, ex-detective Jenny Porter, now a risk analyst with Social Security, had as good as promised Gemma as much work as she could handle. ‘We’re outsourcing many of our departments,’ Jenny had told her, ‘including fraud investigations. We’ve narrowed the list down to you or Solidere Security. Forget I told you any of this.’ Gemma promised and then did some discreet investigating herself. She checked them out and the word so far was that Solidere was a well run business with good professional standards and a lot of money behind it. Gemma was confident, however, that she’d have the edge, given that she’d been in the business longer than her rival and because of her connection with Jenny. When I get that contract with Social Security, she thought dreamily, I can expand even further and Mike or Spinner can take over and manage it for me. Then I can please myself. Her thoughts turned to lazy
caffé latte
mornings at Tamarama and late nights with Steve, dancing in a dive, not having to worry about being up at 6 a.m., having to fill in for an operative who’d suddenly rung in sick. Thanks, Dad, she said despite herself, for the money—now almost all gone—that allowed me to build this business up. And all the time she was thinking of her father, she was trying not to think of the way she’d nearly died on another wet, windy night like this. Shifting her thoughts away from this, she made a mental note to ring Jenny in the next few days to see how things were shaping up and jumped when her mobile rang.

‘Yes?’

‘Gemma? I thought you’d be in bed.’

Her heart lifted. ‘Stevie. Where are you?’ Behind him, she could hear sounds consistent with a nightclub, low voices and music playing.

‘Not far away,’ he said. ‘Is it too late for a visitor?’ Taxi was looking over at her with narrowed green eyes, as if he knew that his rival for bed rights was on the other end of the line. Gemma smiled.

‘Depends on who the visitor is,’ she teased. ‘I need more information. Where’ve you been?’

‘You know that matter we talked about a few weeks ago?’

Gemma remembered dropping in on Steve unexpectedly one afternoon to find him studying black-and-white police photos. He’d whisked them into an envelope immediately when she walked in and quickly pushed it aside.

‘You’ll have to do better than that,’ she said now.

‘What if I said a randy undercover cop found himself in your area with a few hours to spare and a story to tell?’

‘I’d say he might get lucky.’ Gemma felt her body surge with excitement. ‘You drive carefully in this weather,’ she added, as the storm increased outside her haven.

‘You bet,’ he said. ‘I’m on my way.’

Gemma put the phone down, recalling how she’d sneaked a look at the photographs in the envelope when Steve was in the shower. The faces were familiar to her: stolid Mrs Lorraine Litchfield and her glamorous daughter at the funeral of their late husband and father, Sydney crime boss Terry Litchfield, gunned down some time ago outside his home—a daring drive-by shooting—and left to die in the gutter.

Now she danced Taxi round the room, holding one of his front legs stiffly up in the air, like a dancing partner, noticing as she did the dryness of the skin on her fingers and terracotta clay still under her nails. Despite scrubbing and lashings of hand cream, her skin felt tight and parched. She’d spent most of the afternoon down at Phoenix Bay, at the boatshed she was renting, working on her sculpture. The boatshed, on the southern side of the hidden beach south of Tamarama, was a magical place to work. When a full moon pulled the water right up to the stone seawall, Gemma could hear the water lapping under her floorboards. She thought with pleasure of the stylised lion she’d been modelling, copying from the picture of an archaic statue in a book on the isles of Greece. It had required a large amount of clay and a lot of work with tools and hands. Now the almost completed lion leaned out from the bench that ran down the northern wall of the boatshed, slowly drying. She was very proud of the way she’d captured the vigour and thrust of the original so that it faithfully reflected the proud tension of the beast, the way it pressed forward into some timeless place, yearning into eternity. She threw Taxi back down on his chair where he stood, tail lashing, looking away from her while she danced on into the bathroom and showered. When she came out, he was sitting neatly on the client folders in his snail position, tail wrapped tightly around himself, paws under-tucked, eyes almost closed, probably planning revenge, she thought. Gemma put on a cream silk negligee and its matching robe, puffed her new Annick Goutal perfume near her neck, ran a touch of pencil round her eyes, fluffed up her hair and was in the kitchen putting on coffee when she heard a car pull up outside. The powerful motor cut out and in a moment she heard Steve’s gentle tap at the door. It was a measure of Gemma’s trust that she had given Steve a key to the strong grille door at the front of her apartment. During working hours, she let people in and out.

Gemma opened the door and there he was, wearing the black Armani birthday shirt she’d given him, and a gold Scorpio zodiac chain that she hadn’t. With the light shining on the raindrops on his shirt and hair he was like a dark angel and he looked so good that she wanted to laugh out loud. Instead, she stepped back, as much to take him all in as to let him walk by her into the hallway. She could see the tension and strain in his tanned face, the tired sadness in his eyes, the way the furrows running from nose to mouth had deepened. Oh Stevie, she thought to herself, you work too hard and too long. And you work in bad, bad worlds. So do you, whispered a little voice. So do you. She hugged him.

‘You bloody gold-chained lair,’ she whispered, drawing back for him to kiss her and they stayed there, swaying together until she gently disentangled herself.

‘I’ve got fresh coffee on,’ she said eventually.

‘Anything stronger?’

‘Sure.’ She went to the sideboard where the crystal decanters stood with their silver labels on chains around their necks.

‘I came via the boatshed,’ said Steve, ‘and shone my torch through the window.’

Gemma poured Scotch into a glass, smiling to herself.

‘I couldn’t see much of him under his drapes. But he’s got great front feet,’ said Steve. ‘You could put him out there in the garden.’

Gemma nodded, pleased that Steve had bothered to look in on the lion. Then she remembered that Steve noticed everything, it was what made him so effective.

‘He’s not actually finished yet,’ she said. ‘And I’m going to do another one so I’ll have a pair.’

Gemma passed Steve’s drink to him. He tossed it down and threw himself on one of the armchairs. Taxi had vanished. She was dying to ask about the zodiac charm and could barely wait till he put his glass out for another drink. She fetched some ice from the fridge, went back to the decanter and turned around, keeping her voice as casual as she could.

‘Where did you get that Scorpio charm?’

Steve squinted down at it, pulling a face. ‘A woman gave it to me.’ He swung it into his hand and jiggled it up and down. ‘It’s what she thinks is appropriate for a boyfriend.’

Gemma felt her heart give a throb of jealousy as she reached out and touched it. At the same time, she wanted to gather more intelligence about Steve’s undercover job.

‘It looks expensive,’ she said. But then, money would be no object to Terry Litchfield’s widow, Gemma knew.

Steve shrugged. ‘I suppose it is,’ he said. ‘I don’t really take much notice of it, except when it hits me sometimes at the gym.’ He stood up. ‘That email you’ve been getting—I want to see it.’

Gemma shook her head, wishing she’d never mentioned it to him. ‘No, you don’t,’ she said. ‘It’s horrible.’

Steve came closer. ‘How did you get involved in something like that?’

His question caused her body to tighten defensively. She didn’t want to talk about it, not now, and certainly not with Steve. She picked up her empty cup and his glass and walked out to the kitchen. ‘I’ll tell you tomorrow,’ she said. ‘It’s too late now. Do you want another drink?’