Baby Did a Bad Bad Thing (42 page)

‘I wish you’d use a decent bookkeeping program,’ Mike said. ‘I can set up a straightforward one for you.’

‘I can just afford to pay your severance payout as it is,’ she said. ‘I can’t afford any extra services.’

‘Bill me later,’ he said, ‘when things improve.’

‘God knows when that’ll be,’ she said. ‘But I’ve got to get back into work. How’s my computer system?’

Mike smiled. ‘As clean as I could get it,’ he said. ‘While you were in hospital I installed the latest virus scanner for you. You’re all cleaned up and ready to go.’

‘Can you guarantee it will never happen again?’

Mike shook his head. ‘There’s no guarantee,’ he said. ‘All we can do is keep up with the hackers. Just keep banging out incremental improvements, day by day.’

‘So any time something like this could happen again?’

‘If you never open email attachments, you can stay a lot safer,’ he said.

Gemma nodded.

‘Get your correspondents to include their information in the body of the email. Most of the problems are caused by script kiddies mucking around because they can.’

‘You said ‘as clean as you could get it,’ she quoted.

‘I want to do one more thing,’ he said. ‘It’s something I should have done right at the start.’

He sat at her desk and Gemma stood behind him, watching.

‘I’ll have to come up with a nice new business name,’ she said. ‘I’ve never been crazy about the Mercator etcetera.’

Mike leaned forward, concentrating on the screen.

‘It’s time for a name change and a new image.’

‘What about komodo dragon?’ Mike suggested, fingers still moving over the keys, running through arcane programming.

‘I don’t think so,’ she said.

Mike stopped work and stared at the screen. ‘Well, bugger me,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘Just let me check if this is right.’

‘If what is right?’ Gemma said. ‘What are you talking about?’

Mike saved his work and leaned back in her chair. ‘Are you ready for this?’ he asked.

‘Ready for what?’

‘All the mess generated by the exposure of your password and records, the zombie, everything,’ he said, ‘distracted me from one very basic fact.’

‘What?’

‘The original security breach didn’t happen via some cyberstalker out there,’ he said. ‘The initial security breach happened right
here,
in this office, on this very machine.’

‘But,’ she said, ‘the only people who have access to this machine are myself and the people who work for me.’

‘Exactly,’ said Mike. ‘And I know it’s not me who broke in to your system.’

‘And I know it’s not me,’ she said.

‘That leaves only two possibilities,’ she said.

Mike made a face. ‘It’s either that self-righteous little religious fanatic or Miss Mouse,’ he said.

It took him a while but it was when he retrieved Louise’s deleted email that he found what they were looking for. ‘She was talking to the enemy all the time,’ Mike said. ‘Telling Solidere Security everything we were doing.’

‘You were right about being set up,’ Gemma said. ‘Why would she do such a thing? I should feel really angry about it.’

‘I bloody do,’ said Mike. ‘Because of her I got a thumping.’

‘Looking back now it all seems so clear,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘She always had an air of grievance. She never went anywhere. She had that wretched mother to take care of.’

‘She would have looked at you,’ said Mike, ‘and it must have seemed that you had everything going for you. Looks, brains, your own business, a boyfriend .
 
.
 
.’

‘That’s all gone now, just as she planned’ said Gemma. ‘She must have resented me for not giving her the jobs I gave to Spinner and you. But she just wasn’t up to your standard. And then she said something that I wondered about later.
“
It’s all gone wrong,
” she said.
“Terribly wrong”.
’

‘She hadn’t planned on the escalation,’ Mike said. ‘She probably just did some spiteful thing like giving your password out and that opened the floodgates to all the other creeps.’

‘She’s destroyed herself as well as my business,’ said Gemma. ‘I don’t know why I ever employed her in the first place.’ She paused. ‘I think I felt sorry for her.’

‘Not good enough,’ said Mike. ‘Who’s sorry now?’

•

After Mike had gone, she went out into the kitchen and made a coffee, carried it back to her desk and sat down at the computer. She opened her email program and found she had a message. Only one. From Steve. That’s odd, she thought. Steve’s never sent me email before. All her investigator’s instincts were alerted. Something unusual was happening. Something out of the ordinary. Something
wrong
. She hesitated. If I don’t open it, she thought, it can’t hurt me. Outside, the coprosma bush moved in a gust of wind and she went to close the window right down, pleased to have the strong grilles between her and the outside world. She came back to the screen and clicked the message open. It didn’t take her more than a few seconds to realise that it wasn’t from Steve.

‘Hullo Dirtygirl,’
she read.
‘How are things in your apartment at Phoenix Crescent? I’ve posted your address to all the men who want to help you out with your home invasions and rape fantasies.’
It was signed JollyRoger@hotmail.

Gemma stared at the screen, feeling sick. This wasn’t Louise. This was someone else. The cyberstalker. She hit the delete button as fast as she could. But it was too late. Now every perv and psychopath on the net knew exactly where she lived. All the crazy and famished creatures who believed that sex would satisfy their starving souls could drop in, park in her street, hang round her place. The little apartment that she loved so much now felt dark and menacing.
Who is this Jolly Roger creep?
she asked herself. Her mind was in too much turmoil to think clearly. Just pretend, she told herself, that you’re a client who’s had this happen to them. Would you think it was just some random loony out there?

She paced around, unable to be still, anxiety driving her. If this were someone else’s case, she reasoned, I’d have to say ‘no way!’. This is someone who knows you, lady. This is someone very close to you who knows your address and your boyfriend’s name. This is someone acting out of personal spite and malice, someone who wants to punish you. For what? For some offence. But I’m not an ex-wife, she thought. I haven’t taken some bloke to the cleaners. I haven’t put prawns in anyone’s hubcaps.

Her mind kept coming back to Mike Moody. Why? she asked herself. Because he fits the profile, he knows me and he’s got an angry ex-wife. DNA material matching the assault on Robyn Warburton and the murder of Shelly had been found at Mike’s house. On a handkerchief he said wasn’t his. From a coat he denied owning. Over a dozen men had been contacted by the police, she knew, to give a sample so as to eliminate them from the investigation. The coat itself had been taken away. If it isn’t Mike, it’s got to be somebody he knows or somebody who came to his party. Someone’s partner perhaps. Gemma racked her brains, trying to remember Mike’s flatmate’s name. Robert. Roger. Roger something. Jolly Roger. Roger Hollis. Roger Hollis with the familiar voice on the phone. Why was the name, too, familiar? Was it simply because it sounded so ordinary? She went into her program explorer, and typed in ‘
Roger Hollis
’. She waited the few seconds it took to scan through her files.

There was a file in that name from nearly seven years ago. She opened it. As she scrolled through the case, memories returned, clarified. She’d been reminded of someone when Peter Greengate came seeking surveillance on his wife because she’d seen the same hatred in Peter Greengate that she’d seen in another man: the client from whom Gemma had withheld salient facts about his wife’s behaviour because of fears for the woman’s safety. She read the last comments she’d noted down about the case and gasped. The client from whom she’d withheld information all those years had been
Roger Hollis
!

‘
We share similar interests
,’ Mike had said of his ex-flatmate, and Gemma had assumed he meant grievances about ‘the missus’. But Roger Hollis could also be another cop who knew about her and Steve, a techno-freak, like Mike. A hacker. In Gemma’s imagination, the cyberstalker took on the physical dimensions of the man who’d attacked her in the lane. She remembered the ribbon-like streamers that flared from his jacket as she kneed him. Roger Hollis’s ex had destroyed his wardrobe. Did that mean she’d slashed them into ribbons? So now when he plans his attacks on women, he wears the jacket. To remind him of what
she
did, to consecrate his violence. In Gemma’s mind, the stalking figures merged and became one. The cyberstalker, the attacker in the lane, the man who left the DNA traces at Mike’s place, were all the same person!

She jumped to her feet. Oh my God, she thought. I’ve got to get out of here. She raced into the bedroom, packed the Glock in a bag with a box of ammunition, grabbed up her coat, mobile, a rug from the bottom of her cupboard, a packet of chocolate biscuits and left. Roger Hollis now also knows that I lied to him about his wife years ago. He could easily identify himself as the husband in the damning newspaper report about the exposure of her confidential records, cheated on not only by his wife, but also by the very investigator to whom he’d paid good money to catch her at it. Now I’m another woman who’s betrayed him. Another woman he has to punish. For a split second, she thought about going to Kit’s but rejected the idea, remembering another time she’d led a killer to her sister’s house. She ran up the steps, ringing Angie on the way, leaving a message for her.

‘Angie, check out a man called Roger Hollis, until recently living at 646 Todman Avenue, Kensington. Bring him in. Match him against the attack on me, Robyn Warburton and Shelly. I’m lying low for a while, because he knows my address.’

She headed for her car, then stopped. He might easily know my car, too, she thought. She hurried through the dusk down to Phoenix Bay. It was deserted except for a dog chasing seagulls but even he trotted off home as night fell and the beach darkened under the pallid light of a rising moon. With trembling hands, Gemma unlocked the padlock on the boatshed, pulling back the half-jammed door, squeezing in and slamming it shut again, padlocking it on the inside. She switched on the light, bumping it as she did so. The swinging shadows, moving back and forth with the light, startled her and made unsettling patterns on the shrouded shapes of the two lions on the workbench. She reached up and stilled its motion, feeling sick at heart, and looked around. One of the shrouded lions looked wrong somehow, its sheeting hanging right down from the bench to the floor, curtaining the dark area underneath. She knew she hadn’t left it like that. She stayed rigid with fear. Someone was under the bench, crouched low. She started to reach for her gun but remembered Angie’s warning: ‘
Gun in bag with zipper get you dead, lady
.’ Without taking her eyes off the shrouded area under the workbench, she reached around behind her and her fingers closed on a clay tool, an awl with a sharp point.

‘Who’s there?’ she yelled. She jumped back in alarm, fingers scrabbling for the zip on her gun bag, as the shrouding moved a little. ‘Who is it?’ she screamed. ‘Don’t move, just tell me. I’ve got a gun.’

She’d managed to half unzip the bag and was fishing round blindly for the Glock, too terrified to take her eyes off the veiled hide-out under the counter.

‘Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot! It’s me!’

Gemma’s body sagged with relief. ‘You little bastard, Hugo. Get out of there!’ She stood back, as the dishevelled figure crawled out. ‘What do you think you’re doing here?’ she said. ‘I could’ve shot you!’

He crawled out, standing up, face white in the caged globe’s light.

‘How the hell did you get in here?’ she demanded.

‘The window,’ he said. ‘I could just squeeze through.’ The two small windows on the northern side of the shed had always been jammed shut. ‘I found an old rusty fishing knife,’ he said. ‘And I got it open. I didn’t have anywhere else to go.’

She went to the window and saw where the rotting wood of the window frame splintered.

‘Someone dobbed on me and DOCS came round to Naomi’s place to get me. I had to make a run for it.’ He looked shyly proud. ‘Have you got anything to eat?’ he added.

She unzipped her bag, pulled out the packet of biscuits and passed them to him.

‘Wow,’ he said, spotting the Glock. ‘Do you carry that everywhere with you?’

‘No,’ she said.

‘Can I hold it?’ he asked.

Gemma shook her head. ‘It’s not a toy, Hugo,’ she said sternly, but pathetically glad of his company. She shivered and put on the small one-bar heater, heating up some water for pan coffee from the packet of ground beans under the sink while the Ratbag, seated on the little low foldaway bed, wolfed his way through the biscuits. She switched on the tinny radio, sat in the nineteenth-century wooden office chair and began to breathe again. No one knew about this place except Kit and Steve and he was in hospital. She was safe. She could relax. She had a small flask of brandy on the shelf over the sink and she thought she’d earned one. She was rinsing the glass prior to pouring a shot when she heard something. She turned the tap off but then had to wait until the water had gurgled its way down the drain. She strained, listening. Just the wash of the waves against the rocks, the distant sound of traffic up on the road.

‘Did you hear anything?’ she asked the Ratbag. He shook his head. He wouldn’t have heard a thing, she thought, over the crunching of the biscuits.

Her mobile rang and she nearly jumped out of her skin. Steve, she thought, moving to pick it up.

‘Hullo?’ she said. For a moment, she didn’t get it, thought that someone was playing a joke. A rhythm and blues song was coming down the line and a man’s raspy, whispery voice was singing along with it; the voice she’d heard in the lane. ‘
He sings along,
’ Shelly had said,
‘while he’s doing that to them.
’