Feeding the Demons (13 page)

Not necessarily, Gemma thought. It is so easy to collect the most intimate knowledge about perfect strangers. She thought of days, weeks, months even, of sitting watching a house, noticing who came in and who went out. Noticing which car was missing from the garage, or not being used, day after day. Watching the routine of the day right up to the hour the light in the bedroom is finally turned out and the house is in darkness. But that doesn’t mean that things can’t be seen. As long as there is someone outside watching and listening, the household is exposed.

As Garry droned on, listing the facts about the murdered accounts clerk from Maroubra, and the missing girl from South Coogee, Gemma’s mind continued imagining the killer. Perhaps there’d been other women who’d woken to find their clothes all stabbed on the floor who had stayed silent.

‘See,’ said Garry, scratching his balding head in a way Gemma remembered well, ‘what we’re primarily looking for when we build up these victim profiles is
motive.
That’s why we want to know all sorts of things about these two young women. Particularly their personal habits, any friends and enemies and any recent changes in lifestyle. Motive is what we’re after. But these sorts of cases often don’t have what we’d usually call a motive. That’s when profiling can be helpful. But keep in mind,’ Garry added, looking around sternly, ‘that the use of profiling does not replace sound investigation procedures.’

Oh God, Garry, Gemma thought, you are so
boring.
Her mind was racing ahead of him, working through what she knew already about the clothes killer. He’d been opportunistic, noticing a door left slightly open. He’d come into her life through a crack of her own making. She’d have to admit that now. This had excited him, he’d come in closer to investigate. Maybe he had been a ‘virgin’ until then, Gemma thought, and this was the first time he’d gone ‘out’ to find a target. Maybe until then, he’d snow-dropped women’s clothes and wanked over them. She picked out the photographs of the two crime scenes and laid them down, side by side. Too different, said the analysing part of her mind. But some things are similar, said the rationalising part. One idea in particular suggested itself to her, but she wanted to talk to Kit about it and get more depth and clarity before voicing it.

Angie swung round on her seat and pressed the Play button on the video recorder behind her, and the Maroubra crime scene came to slow life again as the camera panned over the murdered woman and her clothes. The group watched the sequence in silence until the screen hissed black and white. Then Angie placed the brand new video from that morning’s abduction into the video player. Again, the methodical, slow video, without characters, without action. Just the mise en scène of violence. Angie followed this with another tape, and Gemma’s breath caught in her throat as she recognised the grainy copy of her tape from the Tusculum Hotel. She leaned back in her seat, not wanting to watch this again, but the silent, slow-moving screen drew her and she sat, mesmerised, as the camera panned across her shredded clothes, the slashed carpet.

‘You were a lucky girl, not to wake up while he was there,’ said Garry Copeland, nodding and smiling and getting on Gemma’s wick, as if he himself had somehow saved her from the killer because of his brilliant, deductive mind. ‘So. You’ve all seen what the Crime Scene examiners saw. And what Gemma videoed. And now I want to run through the main points of the violent offenders’ profile with you.’ Garry’s balding head jerked with enthusiasm.

Gemma inclined towards Angie. ‘I’m off,’ she whispered. ‘Call me if you need me.’ Gemma stood up, clutching the manila envelope, and walked out the door. Angie followed her. ‘Thanks for coming in,’ she said. ‘I appreciate it. What did you think of Copeland and his psych talk?’

‘He’s okay as far as he goes,’ said Gemma. ‘But there’s something bothering me, and I’m not sure yet what it is.’

‘About the abduction?’

‘About the whole business,’ said Gemma. ‘About the three crime scenes. Something doesn’t fit.’

‘Tell me what you’re thinking.’ Angie’s keen, polished face turned and her eyes narrowed with interest.

‘I will,’ Gemma promised. ‘When I’m surer of what it is.’

•

Gemma drove to Silverwater, parked the car in the visitors’ section and was waiting when the radio came to staticky life.

‘Tracker Three calling; copy please, base.’

Gemma snatched up the two-way. ‘Go ahead, Spinner.’

‘I’m at Rose Georgiou’s place,’ he said.

‘“Rose”, is it? You were quick. Getting there, I mean.’

‘I’m going to put the camera in the light fitting right over the bed. Sound and movement activated. Then all we need are the principal actors to show up.’

‘My instincts tell me they’ll arrive as soon as Mrs Georgiou goes to her mum’s for the weekend. You should be in movies, Spinner.’

‘I am,’ he said. ‘Director, producer and camera man.’

‘Is Mrs Georgiou there?’

‘She’s making me a cup of coffee.’

‘Noel got an offer the other day. To make a revenge video. Don’t be tempted,’ she teased.

‘“Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord”,’ Spinner quoted back at her and Gemma found she was smiling as she signed off, fitting the radio back in its housing, then she looked up and saw her father walking towards her. He was carrying a small overnight bag and a rolled-up newspaper. Gemma was reminded of a workman going home for dinner. Her heart beat hard in her chest and her mouth went dry. She got out of the car and walked round to the passenger side to open the door for him, to give herself something to do.

‘Hullo,’ she said, straightening up.

Her father didn’t answer for a second. Then he put his bag down and opened his hands in a helpless gesture. ‘May I hug you?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know,’ she said, feeling foolish.

He looked at her intently, picked up his bag again, and climbed into the car. ‘You’ve answered me,’ he said. ‘Maybe later on.’ Gemma climbed in and started the car.

‘Thank you for picking me up,’ he said. ‘It’s kind of you.’ On the phone he’d told her about the flat in Glebe he’d organised to stay at after his release, with the man who’d been his cellmate the last few years and was released earlier in the year, a solicitor who’d overreached himself and used money from a trust fund. Gemma drove towards the city. It was an overcast day with a glaring sky. She switched the radio on, finding something that she thought her father might like.

‘It’s hard to believe,’ he said, ‘that I’m never going back there again. That I don’t have to be back tomorrow night. That I’ll be sharing a flat with Paul like any other single man of sixty-seven.’

‘What will you do with yourself?’ she asked.

‘I’ve still got some money,’ he said. ‘And with the pension I should manage all right. Paul said he could find me the occasional search to do or some research work.’ He paused. ‘I’m going to write a book,’ he said. ‘Two books, actually. I’m determined that the world will see that what I said was true.’

‘That’s one book,’ she said.

‘And I’ve been working on something else of a medical nature. But I need to research it more.’ He looked over at her, smiling in a way that revealed his large, white teeth.

The expression on his face catapulted her back thirty years and she suddenly remembered him speaking at the university to a hall full of important doctors. Her mother, thin and nervous in a fur coat, had clutched Gemma’s hand too tight as the lecture hall filled with gentlemen, young and ancient, wearing brilliant robes with hoods and fur trim. Her heart had been bursting with pride and love because this was her father that all these important people had come to hear. But then she remembered shivering in the big square wicker clothes basket, huddled up to Kit, hearing his voice screaming at their mother. This time, she was able to remember the outline of the fight. ‘All you have to do is keep your bloody children quiet. That’s all I expect of you. No cooking, no housework, nothing like that because all of that is beyond you. But just keep them quiet! And you can’t even do that!’ and the door of his forbidden study slamming and the sobbing of their mother.

‘Where was it,’ she said, keeping her voice steady, ‘that you were giving some talk or other, and there were men in academic robes?’

Her father looked out the window. ‘Oh, I did a few of those,’ he said. ‘Various universities. I was the leading light there for a while.’ And now the leading light and terrifying door-slammer was a frail old-age pensioner with thin silver hair and skin and eyes that were very like hers. Gemma’s own brimmed with tears. ‘That was a long time ago,’ he said. ‘I’m surprised you can remember it.’

‘Kit remembers a lot more,’ said Gemma, then wished she hadn’t.

‘Ah, Kit,’ he said. ‘She was always on the look-out.’

‘For what?’ said Gemma, surprising herself.

Her father shrugged. ‘The first born is always more tuned in to what’s going on. More alert. I did a very good paper once on the effects of birth order in families.’

‘I’d like to see that one day,’ said Gemma. ‘And I’m sure Kit would, too.’

Suddenly he swung round on her. ‘Does she still think I did it?’

There was a shocked silence and then Gemma nodded. ‘Yes, I’m afraid she does.’

‘So how does she feel about you seeing me again?’

‘She’s not very happy about it. But she accepts that I have my own way of doing things.’

‘She followed in my footsteps,’ he said. ‘She’s a therapist.’ Gemma could hear the pride in his voice and she felt a twinge of jealousy. ‘Is she any good? Does she get good results with her clients?’

‘You’d have to ask her that. She doesn’t work like you did,’ said Gemma. ‘She’s a bioenergetic therapist.’

‘Bioenergetics.’ He made a dismissive sound. ‘Psychiatrists have always been able to make a lot of money out of hysterical women. I suppose she knows that mad old Reich died disgraced in prison. Him and his orgone box.’

‘Who?’ said Gemma.

‘Never mind,’ he said. ‘The important thing is whether you believe I did it or not.’

They had never talked like this before. Now, driving along in the car with the day going on around them, the traffic, the people on the streets, the ordinariness of daily life, such intimacy seemed perfectly acceptable. It was almost as if now he was out, everything else had to come out, too.

‘No,’ she said. ‘I don’t believe you did.’

She felt him relax beside her and lean back in the seat. ‘All the evidence was circumstantial,’ he said. ‘They never explained that footprint. It wasn’t mine. There was no way anyone could have said that I did it except for the bloodstain pattern interpretation. And that was always going to be controversial. The defence expert said that the blood on my jacket was consistent with what I said—that your mother coughed on me as she was being lifted onto the stretcher. There was always argument about the time of the attack. Naturally the prosecution put it at the time I got home. The defence and I knew it was earlier.’

Gemma found herself picturing this, the bleeding woman on the stretcher, her father helping lift her mother from the dining room floor and then onto the stretcher and into the back of the ambulance, the terrible facial injuries from the black and white crime scene photographs in her mind now brilliant with blood.

‘These days,’ she said, ‘more and more cases are hanging on expert versus expert. I’m going to show the crime scene photographs to a visiting bloodstain expert.’

Her father looked at her, very interested. ‘Name of?’ he asked.

‘Dr Zelda Firestone.’

Her father shook his head. ‘I should know her name,’ he said, ‘but I don’t.’ He paused and Gemma noticed his head fall forward onto his chest a moment, as if he were praying or thinking deeply. ‘For a long time,’ he said after a while, ‘I did everything I could to get my case reopened. I did a lot of work on the action of blood and bloodstain interpretation. People forget that psychiatrists have a medical degree first. But time after time I was knocked back on appeal. That, and the life of a convict—’ His voice faltered. ‘—eventually wore me down. I just gave up.’ Then he swung around on her and Gemma glanced quickly at him and back at the road but not before noticing that he was furious. ‘I should never have been convicted!’ he said. ‘Things happened
exactly
as I told them at the time. That is the truth.’

‘I’m going to do everything in my power,’ she said, ‘to get your case reopened.’

Her father seized her hand on the steering wheel, squeezed it, and let it go. ‘My daughter,’ he said, ‘my little Gemfish.’ He seemed overcome for a few moments and Gemma’s eyes blurred with tears. She swallowed hard.

At the lights, her father looked around at the shops and pedestrians. ‘So busy,’ he said. ‘This area used to be almost rural.’ He noticed a bottleshop across the road with an advertisement for specials on Hahndorf wines. ‘Ha!’ he snorted. ‘Still a touch of the barnyard. I wonder if they’d sell as much of that wine if the buyers knew it translates as Cock Town Wines!’ This only amused him for a moment and he fell back into a brooding silence.

‘My story has never changed,’ he said finally. ‘I did not touch your mother that night except when I picked her up and helped the ambulance officers.’ Gemma changed lanes ready to turn onto the motorway. Her father had turned away and was staring out his window. He remained silent for the rest of the trip, brooding in some place of his own.

Gemma briefly came in with her father to his new Glebe address, a small flat at the back of a grand old terrace that opened out onto a dark, overgrown garden. There were two bedrooms, a lounge and a large kitchen that opened out with lead-light windows onto a quarry-tiled patio before the jungle of oleanders, palms and hibiscus that barely flowered because of the lack of light. The flat itself had a subterranean feel to it and the eastern walls were sandstone, cut out of the living rock. He seemed pleased to make her a cup of coffee and show her around.

‘I feel very much at home now. I’ve been staying here,’ he told her, ‘on weekend release. Paul is a nice fellow. You’ll like him. I’ve told him all about my clever private investigator daughter.’ In his room, he already had a desk and small computer set up under the window next to his single bed. ‘I want to get all my papers and records out of storage,’ he said. ‘Do you know anyone with a van who’d like to earn some extra money?’